توضیحات جورج

BEC : Free Agent -George

Hi, this is George. I want to talk to you a little bit about this subject of free agency. I’ll talk more on the lines of let’s call it corporate business, even though it may not be corporate, but from the business standpoint versus the entrepreneurial standpoint. I’m talking now organizations that have more than one or two employees. It could be 10-20, it could be thousands.

The concept that we’re talking about here - free agency - applies within this realm and within the job that you’ve got in that realm just as much or more than even the entrepreneurial situation. The idea is you want to sell yourself. You want to become unique. You want to be a brand and I mentioned in our first lesson that you want to have a buzz about yourself. Well, the very first thing you do, I don’t care what your job is, be the best that there is in that job. That in itself creates a buzz. That’s a good start.

The next thing I really believe that you need to do after you are the best that there is in that job is expand your horizons. By that I mean expand your knowledge. Expand your awareness. Expand your understanding of the company or the organization that you’re working for. That is very key, because the people who are going to move up the ladder, in other words, get the promotions, get the good jobs, things of that nature, are the people who understand the total scope, the total business that they’re dealing with, the total scope. They know a lot about everything that’s going on in the business.

I don’t care if you’re an administrator. We talked about the accounting folks, accounts payable and accounts receivable. What do they do? Well, they’ll tell you lots of things they do, but they pay bills or they collect money from customers. You know a great idea on the first thing you can do to expand your knowledge if you’re in a position like that or similar? What does your company make? What is your company’s product? Do you know? I’ll give you a hint or give an idea.

Go find a sales manager and see if you can get some time where that sales manager will sit down with you and show you the products that his or her people are selling. What are the products? Are they hard things that you can hold on to? Well, have that sales person if they will maybe take you through a sales pitch. However they want to do it, but find out what products does your company make. What do they do? What do they look like? How do you turn them on? How do you turn them off? How big are they? Simple little things like that. Understand your product set. What is it your company produces? The same could be true if you’re, say, in a software business. You don’t have any so- called hard products other than those little disks I guess that people throw around, but you can do the same thing. Do you know what the software products --computer products --are that your company produces? Do you know what they’re for? Are they accounts payable programs? Are they accounts receivable programs? Are they books? What are they? Find out what they are. That’s a step in expanding your knowledge, your business knowledge, increasing your scope and that type of process works no matter what job you’re in and crossing the barriers.

If you’re one of those salespeople, well guess what? It’s a good idea if you’re a salesperson to understand the accounts receivable process. You go out there and sell something, well that’s going to generate a bill, an invoice. What better way to help keep your customer happy than to understand that process so that they don’t get in trouble and all of a sudden the accounts receivable person sends you a note and says you can’t sell to these people anymore because they’re disputing a bill and this just isn’t going to work out. Well, understand the process, okay? Let me give you an example, a very high-level example of how this works in major corporations and when I say major corporations I’m talking about big corporations.

We’re talking folks that probably have, I don’t know, certainly more than 500 people, big companies. Have you ever noticed, maybe you haven’t, but take notice, the CEO, the Chief Executive Officer of the company, take a look at his resume some time. By that I mean where’s he been or where’s she been. What jobs have they had.

I would be willing to bet you the CEO, pick a CEO, at some time in their past if you look down at the previous jobs they’ve had they were in charge of either a director or a vice president or a manager of some sort of administrative function. I would bet that they were also in charge of some sort of marketing or sales function. I would suggest that they might also have been in charge of some kind of human resources and manufacturing or distribution operation within their company or maybe within two or three other companies that they worked for.

It’s not uncommon to see the vice president of administration all of a sudden get moved to vice president of marketing. You can sit back and say well, that’s crazy. They don’t know anything about that. Guess what? That’s part of the grooming process for the CEO. What’s the grooming process? That’s the process large corporations go through to prepare executives to move to higher and higher levels. They groom them.

No, they don’t take a comb and comb their hair and pat them down. They educate them and they educate them by putting them in positions of authority over organizations that maybe they don’t have all the knowledge of that they did when they came into it. So they put them in that job with the idea of them learning everything they can about that organization, that piece of the business and how to manage that piece of the business so that it makes a contribution to the total business.

So they may have been director of administration, director of sales, vice president of marketing, senior vice president of manufacturing and then all of a sudden hey, this person knows everything about our company, about our business, so we’re going to make him a CEO. Not only do they know about it, they know how to manage it. That’s how people become CEOs. It doesn’t necessarily have to be just within their own company. They can come from two or three different companies on the way up.

That’s how you get ahead. Take that as an example. Put yourself down there, whatever level you’re at, and think of how those CEOs get to be CEOs. You want to be a manager? You want to be a director? You want to be a second line manager? Think of that process. Just drop it down to your level. I’m going to learn all I can about administration, about marketing, about finance, about sales, about distribution, whatever there is to learn.

Whether it’s in your own company or you decide to move on to another company, that’s how you’re going to get ahead. That’s how you’re going to hopefully get to that job that you really, really want, the one that’s going to satisfy you and, guess what? The one that’s going to satisfy you from an internal attitude standpoint is the one that’s going to reward you the most financially and emotionally.

So that’s my thoughts on free agency and a good way or some good ideas, I hope, that you might use to make your free agency work for you. Okay? Talk to you next time.

The End.